Sure You’re Not Called the “Outlandish Group”?

Get this: A new report from the Standish Group claims that FOSS–free and open source software–is decimating the software market. To wit:

Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies.”

Quite a claim. A contentious one too, since, according to research outfit IDC, Linux software actually contributed $10 billion to the market and is expected to contribute $31 billion by 2011. The 2011 forecast for spending on the entire Linux ecosystem? More than $49 billion.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, a Web search for “Standish Group”+Microsoft+”sponsored by” didn’t return any documents.